My Heart

A trip to Utah would not be complete without visiting my family and friends.  I think that is what has been the hardest part of this COVID-19 quarantine is not being able to hang with my friends and it makes me appreciate my family even more because I honestly couldn't imagine being single or widowed at this time and having no one to talk to all day.  My heart goes out to those people who are in this category.  It must be hard!  The first person I visited while in Utah was my son Harris!  He is going to school in Provo.  It was so great to see him.  We went out to breakfast at a place called Waffle Love.  So yummy.  Then followed by lunch at Indian Palace then he had to go to a Rocketry meeting.  Remember this was before social distancing was a thing.  How little did I know that everything was going to drastically change in a matter of days.




Then that evening, I met my friend Diane and her two daughters for dinner at a local cafe.  I can't seem to remember the name of the place at the moment.  It was the first time meeting her daughters from China.  Such lovely girls!


Then off it was to my hotel, where I enjoyed a great night's sleep and I was excited to meet my friend Sandy who I haven't seen in a couple of years.  I also met with one of the young women who was serving as a missionary in our ward here in Georgia.  I got to meet her sweet mommy too!




I  ate lunch with some friends I met in Germany 8 years ago.  It was wonderful to be able to catch up on their lives. We ate at a restaurant called Spitz in Lehi. So delicious!  I went up to SLC to search out spots to do a photo shoot on Sunday before I left to go home to my friend's daughter who is a  Senior. I found lots of great locations then I drove up north to see our old nanny and meet her family.  It had been 11 years since I had seen her.  She watched the older boys when Roman was born so that we would have someone there to take care of them when Roman needed to have his open-heart surgery.  It was great seeing Laurel.





My time with Laurel was short and I drove down to South Jordan to have dinner with a fellow adoptive mom Heather. It was the first time meeting her, but we have known each other through Facebook since I adopted Avery.  Her daughter was super sweet.


That ended day two and I was able to sneak a very quick visit in with my friend Bree on the next morning before heading to the retreat.


Sadly, I didn't get a picture with my best friend Buffi who flew in on Sunday and stayed with me a night before I headed home.  We ate dinner with my son Harris at the Red Iguana.  It was ok, but not fantastic though maybe it was because they were so busy.  Well, this is the end of my Utah series.  Next my son's trip to Disney with his choir right before everything locked down.  He was so lucky that the trip wasn't scheduled for a week later.


Comments

Beth said…
I enjoyed catching up with you. I read your latest virus journal but can't get back to it to comment. My son has his kids a week at a time and has 2 combined families so it gets tense during this time. Their school district hasn't posted much work so that doesn't help. My daughter's kids are still getting their regular assignments so that helps. Her school system is a prosperous one in Dallas, and my son's is a rural poor district not set up for online schooling except for an occasional google outreach. But we are all hanging in there.
Your happy smiles are just what is needed now. I hope that you are all keeping well and safe.
Amalia
xo
Dearest Kelleyn,
My goodness, no comment from my first time... I'd done so my best!
Yes, my heart is fully understood by me. After each trip home to see relatives and dear friends, I've lived in a kind of a daze for about a week... People that have no far away relatives and friends never fully will understand!
All people that raise the child(ren) from somebody else have a big heart. We know too what that means as we have only an adopted daughter, from British Columbia (part first nation, part Dutch and part Scottish) and our foster-daughter from Indonesia.
We met her while living/working there for 3 years. At Church they were all together. It was a boarding school for the girls, ages 5-18. Their real parents maybe could come for a visit otherwise they only met them during summer vacation... Tough! So, naturally they came to us for a substitute parent, ringing the doorbell at 5:00 AM on Sunday mornings. Our only day off. We had to go see the principal and tell her (Roman Catholic nuns run it and the Roman Catholic brothers run the one for the boys, about 150 each) to not let them come in groups of 15 anymore... We could not handle that! They were deaf, so they had to read my lips. Yes, I spoke their language as I had to do training for the people in harvesting mushrooms. Funny, sitting there once with a candle held to my mouth, in the dark, during a power outage... so they still could read my lips!
We took care of one very shy girl, Anita and paid for her college and university after the monetary collapse in Asia, her Dad could only pay for her younger brother. Yes, still a nation (biggest Muslim nation in the world!) where girls are second place... and so are women.
We know the feeling of giving such love and we were mighty proud for having her graduate from University with one point above average of her class and all that with reading lips!!!
She and her then fiancée came to the US after graduation. I've sat. up for hours during the night for communicating directly with the Consulate General in Jakarta. It was tricky for getting through to her, via numerous chains but speaking the language and being persuasive and often using the term: I'm returning a call to Madam... did the trick! But it robbed my sleep... did pull it off with a Congressional letter and the help and support of numerous U.S. Senators. Not easy and I won't do that again... But she was here for a couple of months end of 2004 during Christmas also. Again in 2008 for a different reason, to get her mind off from a wrong choice boyfriend, a Muslim convert who probably brainwashed her terribly. It did not help, she married him against the will of her 4 parents; natural and foster... What a fate and she of course got abused and no kids, guess he took care of that problem after having produced his two sons whom he cold heartedly abandoned, never paid a penny for them as they were teens... But our Anita is married again in Church on March 15 and let's hope this time it will work out for her!
Do you know what some rude people have asked us here? When they learned that Anita had to read lips as she couldn't hear... "Couldn't you find a normal one?"... That arrived like a dagger inside our heart! My reply was: "Can you please give me the definition of what normal is?"
After she graduated and was back in Indonesia I learned that there were Australian doctors in Jakarta with a new clinic for Cochlear implantation. So we contacted them and she went there for an evaluation. We'd tried to do it here in the US but with her limited English the questioning for all the finetuning would not work out well, aside from the cost. A friend of the son of a close friend was willing to come from Atlanta to perform the surgery here in Dublin and that for some $ 40,000,00 out of pocket as she was not insured here. We could not do it. Now she got her assessment done and they contacted me and told us that she was way too good for receiving a Cochlear implantation. We were happy and shocked. They offered instead to go for the newest high tech Danish Oticon hearing aids and she could hear then. So we did that, she traveled the 7 hours by train to Jakarta numerous times and when she called the first time and said: "Mama, I can hear you!" I wept... What a joy for someone who never before could hear nature, no water, no music!
So that is our story and therefore the subject HEART is well understood!
Big hug,
Mariette

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